And before I go deeper into that, I just wanted to tell you how much it pains me that I didn't get it.
It pains me generally because I really dislike the experience of not vibing with a movie that I know many people adore. It sends an instant shooting pain to my inner core of self doubt.
Adore? In fact, Wikipedia has this to say about the movie:
The film premiered in Hong Kong on 14 July 1994 and received critical acclaim, especially for its direction, cinematography, and performances. Since then it has been regarded as one of Wong's finest works, one of the best films of 1994, of the 1990s, of the 20th century, and of all time, as well as one of the best anthology films and romantic comedies ever made.
I'd call that hyperbole, but they've got the receipts. It was at #88 on the 2022 Sight & Sound poll.
But it also pains me because I had been looking for this movie for a very long time. It had previously eluded me. I'd gone to the various streaming services and rental sources on multiple occasions in the past, and I'd never found it.
In fact, I was so looking for it, that I watched it on the very day I realized it was available on Kanopy. I mightn't have, but only a few minutes after I saw it was available, I also saw that it was in the "Leaving Soon" category. I didn't bother to test how soon.
But no, I didn't end up getting it, making this another mortal wound to my credibility as a cinephile. Obviously only one mortal wound is enough to kill you, so I'm using that metaphor poorly.
Instead of further berating myself for not getting on Wong's wavelength, I think I'll tell you instead the ways the movie triggered me. And they have to do with another heralded, influential film that left me even colder than this one, made a decade earlier, and watched by me a decade ago.
I'd already seen plenty of Jim Jarmusch films by the time I saw Stranger Than Paradise in February of 2015. Given that I'd liked most of them, I thought it was time to go back to where it all started. (Almost. He'd made Permanent Vacation four years earlier, which I watched two years later.)
But boy did I loathe Stranger Than Paradise.
There were lots of things I loathed about it, some of which repeated themselves in Chungking Express, where I did not loathe them but I did not like them either. But let's start with the one I've alluded to here in the subject of this post.
One of the things that immediately took me out of the movie was the fact that the character Eva, played by Eszter Balint, is so obsessed with Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" that it is literally the only song she ever plays. In fact, I think listening to the song might be the only thing she does. She stands around, holding her boom box below her waist, playing "I Put a Spell on You," and when it ends, she starts it over and plays it again. (I don't know if it was a boom box. This is my memory of it.)
I don't believe this as a character trait for a person.
You may like a song, but you can't listen to the same song over and over again, even if you love it, particularly if you want to continue loving it. You might listen to it a couple times a day, but they would be spread out. And after about a week of this, you'd have gotten it out of your system.
I don't remember the timeframe of Stranger Than Paradise, but in my memory of it, Eva never gets it out of her system and just keeps listening to this song over ... and over ... and over again.
Incidentally, I think this movie plays a significant role in why I don't like that song.
It's an unbelievable trait she shares with the character Faye, played by Faye Wong, in Chungking Express.
It's not Screamin' Jay Hawkins that Faye plays. That would be too on the nose for Wong, even though I suspect he was influenced by Stranger Than Paradise in some ways, if not others.
No, Faye is into "California Dreamin'" by The Mamas and the Papas. This is the song she plays over ... and over ... and over again.
I do still like "Dreamin'," not so much Screamin'.
I just don't really understand the narrative function of having a character listen to a song over and over again. Chungking finds this character to be quirky, for sure, but she's also glamorized as pretty cool, with her short hair and her whimsical relationship to her surroundings. Chungking Express is not making fun of Faye.
The best reason I can tell for Faye listening to this song on repeat is that she really is dreaming of California and she does eventually go there. (Spoiler alert. Wait, you can't spoil a movie like Chungking Express.) However, I find this an excessively literal usage of the song, which is not great either.
If you don't know the structure of the movie, it basically contains two halves that focus on two different Hong Kong cops and their odd flirtations with two different women (with the shadow of a second woman hanging over both stories). I was cautiously on board with the first one of these, where the cop is in a 30-day period of hoping his ex will get back together with him, and each day of the month of April -- they broke up on the 1st -- he buys a can of her favorite canned pineapples with the expiration date of May 1st, which is also his birthday. If he gets to the end of the month and she has not gotten back together with them, he will give up and consider their relationship to be expired.
In the meantime, he's also sort of becoming interested in a woman he barely meets who wears a rain slicker and sunglasses at all times of the day, who is involved in drug smuggling with Indian mules. To be clear, I am talking about Indian men and women who are smuggling her drugs. This is sort of a weird combination of story bits, but I am still on board.
It's when Wong wipes the slate clean and starts over with two other characters in the second half that my patience got tested and that I decided I was not really liking the movie.
I appreciated Chungking in a basic visual way. There are some very compelling tricks going on here, some of which involve a blurry slow motion in which forward movement is captured by a bunch of individual frames of movement (not sure how to describe this any better). Then there's also the effect where two planes of motion are established at the same time, the character moving in regular speed in the foreground and the background speeding by. I liked all this stuff. I just wanted it to be in service of a narrative that spoke to me more.
But I should tell you that I was also being further alienated by another of my triggers.
One of the things I don't like about a certain period of Jarmusch, which also reminds me of a certain period of Godard, is that it relies too heavily on guys wearing wifebeater undershirts and smoking cigarettes. This was also something I didn't like about Wong's Days of Being Wild, made four years earlier in 1990, so I suppose it should be no surprise that it also features heavily here.
Without going too much into my personal psychology, the wifebeater, for me, signifies a form of masculinity that I do not relate to. I'm not devoid of traditional forms of masculinity -- I love my sports, for example -- but a guy who would wear around a wifebeater, even in the privacy of his own home, represents to me a guy who would treat women with casual malevolence and imagines himself as some sort of icon of cool. (I should say that I also don't like wifebeaters for practical reasons, which is that I don't like my neck area and I prefer to have tighter fitting undershirts.)
I mean, I don't suppose I'm telling you anything new here. There's a reason we call it a wifebeater.
But for directors like Wong and Jarmusch, and I guess Godard, it seems to represent this ideal incarnation of the human male. I feel like they are trying to tell us that these guys are cool and that we are not, unless we are also willing to throw on a wifebeater and smoke a cigarette while directing casual malevolence at a woman.
The malevolence toward women is absent here, but the associations still stick. And so I find myself feeling negatively toward the Chungking charactes who spend so much time in wifebeater undershirts, and also who feel unselfconscious about the tighty whities they're wearing.
Do my personal hangups constitute real reasons not to like a movie?
They don't, but when you take enough of them in combination, you can see why the movie doesn't work for me:
1) The song "California Dreamin'" gets played a dozen times, because one character keeps playing it;
2) The plot is alienating in its eccentricity, rather than good in its eccentricity;
3) Too many wifebeaters.
If my goal with this post was not to seem obtuse in my reasons for not liking Chungking Express, well, I may have failed in that regard. But unlike some of the characters in this movie, I'm not going out of my way to show you how cool I might be. I'm happy enough being somewhat lame. It's more honest.
And I do wonder if all the others who say they love Chungking Express are being similarly honest with themselves.
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